


Burnt Offerings

by twilfit_and_tattings



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-War, Angst, F/M, Hatemance, Work In Progress, dramione - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 15:11:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1692836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twilfit_and_tattings/pseuds/twilfit_and_tattings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>War burns through everything, but sometimes the greatest damage is done to those who survive it. Voldemort is gone, but so is Ron, and with him everything Hermione had never even contemplated losing. Now she must try to sort out how to get from one day to the next on her own, the Trio now a relic of another life. But she is far from the only one facing an uncertain future...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burnt Offerings

**Author's Note:**

> I own nothing apart from a craving for feedback. First-time poster, be kind. :)

_No_.

A scream was building, clawing its way up from some monstrous black pit in Hermione's chest, but her throat was suddenly too tight to let it out. There was a dim awareness of the rain, pinpricks of ice running together to creep over her head, her face, the exposed skin at her hands and wrists and ankles, but the chill had ceased to register. Because lying in a lifeless arc at her feet, like a broken string curling from the neck of a violin, was Ron Weasley.

His hair, that burnt sunset red, grown long enough to brush his collar in the past few months, was riddled with streaks of mud: the blacks and greens and browns of ruined flesh. His skin was milk-white, each freckle stark as a drop of ink, the color gone from his lips and cheeks. It was a mercy that his eyelids had drifted shut as he went, as Hermione thought she might've gone truly mad if she'd had to see those warm brown eyes extinguished, turned to so much dark glass.

She scarcely noticed her own movements as she sank to her knees, Ron's vacant face looming suddenly closer. She extended a trembling finger and trailed it along the curve of his cheek, so slowly that she felt as though she were moving through water. The filth that clung to her, the creeping mold of battle, rubbed off where she touched his skin; the sight of the smear of dirt on the icy plane of his face made her recoil, snatching back her hand and suddenly fighting the urge to vomit. Despite the flecks of stubble trailing along his jaw, he was so young-looking in his unearthly stillness. She could still see the soft blue threads of his veins in his neck, half expecting them to throb with his pulse as she watched.

Her eyes dragged down along his abdomen, absorbing the sight of him in a transfixed sort of horror. He was in the well-worn Cannons shirt she'd bought him, the one he'd ripped at the shoulder and stubbornly kept on wearing all these weeks - if she'd offered to mend it once, she'd offered a thousand times. Her vision swam, and all the dead and disparate parts of Ron blurred into a pool of faded orange before her. She thought wildly that maybe if he had been wearing black instead, he might have been spared; maybe his killer hadn't known who he was, hadn't mowed him down in pursuit of the Boy Who Lived, had only glimpsed the foolish brightness of his clothing through the knotted trees... The thought made her feel as though she were about to fly apart into uncountable pieces, only the damp veil of her skin holding her together.

In some more orderly, logical portion of her brain, she heard a sudden voice that sounded strangely like Harry, begging her to move. She couldn't linger here, not when Snatchers and Death Eaters still filled the forest with screams and reckless laughter and flashes of colored light. It wasn't until she felt large hands latching onto her right arm and tugging, their owner groaning and breathlessly yanking her to her feet, that she realized it really was Harry.

“You can't – we can't help him, Hermione,” he choked out, clutching her with such desperation that even through her clothes, she felt every one of his fingernails digging into her rain-deadened skin. “We've got to move.” His words were scarcely distinguishable from sobs.

He was right, of course, and with that same sense of automatic, unthinking movement she was walking again, trying not to breathe through her mouth, sickened by the taste of wet, decaying soil on the night air. Numbly she watched as a cluster of trees to her left blossomed with green light, a sharp, unnatural rushing sound audible even in the din of battle. She hadn't even heard the incantation; it might've been whispered as delicately as an endearment, but now someone else was dead, too. Someone else was lying, unseen, in the muck, just like Ron. Her heart struggled to beat through the fresh surge of fear, thudding unevenly in her chest.

 _We've got to find Ginny_ , she tried to say then, her tongue thick and stupid and incapable of speech. But Harry was clearly thinking the same thing; she could hear him muttering the other girl's name, over and over like some anguished prayer, tears making his voice sound swollen and strange.

He continued dragging Hermione by the arm, his grip like steel cord above her elbow, ever-tightening. She tried to tell him that he was hurting her, that her fingers were beginning to tingle and prickle with lack of blood flow, but her throat clamped down on the words. His hand was becoming oddly hot, almost feverish, just this side of painful even through her sleeve. She glanced down at her arm in senseless panic, but it was not Harry's hand that held fast to her.

A thick-bodied snake, black scales gleaming greenish like enameled steel, was wrapped around her from wrist to shoulder, tightening more and more with each second that passed. She watched muscles ripple beneath its skin as the coils shifted, closing together, winding round and round. Frantic, she began to tear at it, fingernails gaining no purchase as they raked across the hard, dry scales, and glancing around wildly for Harry. He was gone, and the trees felt so much closer to her now, black pikes stabbing up through wells of pale, sickly moonlight. The serpent wound around her tighter still.

Her mind narrowed down to the single, consuming thought that this was pain beyond pain, the snake was going to tear her arm off at the socket, and the scream she'd been fighting since she'd found Ron's corpse finally won, bursting from her like a geyser of blood, searing her throat on its way out, and then everything went colorless and empty.

* * *

 

Hermione was thrown back into consciousness with the scream still ripping its way out of her mouth. Her eyes flew open, and her hand shot out to grab her wand off of the bedside table, the practiced motion fluid even in the confusion and semi-dark of very early morning.

“Lumos,” she gasped out, surrounding herself instantly with a pool of warm, golden light.

She was not in the Forbidden Forest, of course; her mind knew this, but the rest of her would take a moment to catch up. Her heart hammered and strained against the confines of her chest, her own pulse filling her throat. She reached up with a shaking hand and pushed back the curtain of damp curls that had plastered itself to the side of her face. Her sweat was running in curling lines down her body, at the nape of her neck, through the hollow between her breasts and along her spine, like tiny rivers of ice. She swiped away a cold tingle just below her collarbone, and huffed out a long breath.

She made the usual circuit with her lit wand, passing it slowly in a broad arc around her, letting the comfort of the light flush out the shadows and uncertainty from the corners of her rented room. One of the Leaky Cauldron's cheapest, it was so small that she could do this while still seated in the middle of her bed. Finishing her survey, such as it was, she let out another slow breath and lowered herself back against her pillow, cringing as her skin met the soaking cloth. The nightmare was a familiar one, though she had to admit the snake was new.

Sometimes the dream meandered through the smoking ruins of Hogwarts until she and Harry found Ginny collapsed in the Entrance Hall, bloodied and with a broken leg, but alive. Other nights she would barely catch a glimpse of Ron's paper-white face before her mind would eject her, and she would vault awake, shuddering and sitting upright, eyes streaming, wand already in hand. And then, the worst of all of them: things would play out all the way through to the end, through the blood and the rubble and the destruction of Voldemort, but it would be Mrs. Weasley's broken, hysterical sobs that would echo in Hermione's head for her entire waking day. Always a bit different, but, really, always the same.

Her breathing was finally within her control again, and she forced herself to inhale and exhale slowly, deliberately, as she began her nightly count. The ceiling tiles above her bed were made of an ivory stone, veined in gold, that must once have been beautiful; now they were all chipped in the corners, stained yellow and orange in irregular blotches that suggested potions gone wrong, or insects smashed with the head of a broom. There were fifty-two such tiles comprising the ceiling of her room. Despite knowing this for certain, having spent two months' worth of nights scanning the space above her bed, it was oddly calming, a sort of ritual now, for her to count them all. By the time she would reach the thirties, her pulse would have retreated back to its usual rhythm, the sweat would be drying on her skin, and the nightmare would have receded into the dark spaces behind her thoughts, leaving her a few hours of dreamless peace before dawn.

Tonight, though, she could still feel thick sinews slithering in rings around her arm, clinging to her with bruising force. She rubbed her bicep, willing away the sensation, nearly aching despite her unmarked flesh. Focusing on her ritual, she made it all the way to fifty-two and again to seventeen before she finally felt her muscles relaxing, the snake relinquishing its grip. That, at least, had been nothing but a dream.

* * *

Beginning most mornings as she did, just a hair after six thirty, the pub was deserted when Hermione came down for breakfast. The sun was just coaxing some color into the sky outside, sending shafts of watery light in through the large chinks in the pub's shutters. Judging by the smoky smell wafting out through the open kitchen door, it would seem Tom had already set to work on her usual: two rashers, two eggs, very strong tea. Occasionally he would try to slide a pile of chips onto her plate, clucking like a housewife that he could see too many of her bones, but she would only smile politely and push them aside.

“Morning, Miss Grant!” he hollered as he passed the kitchen doorway, large iron skillet in hand. “I'll have it out in two shakes.”

A mug of tea and the day's _Daily Prophet_ were already waiting for her at her usual spot, a table in the back left corner. Some would call it paranoia - other regulars and tenants surely did - but there was something comforting in being able to see all of the entrances and exits to a room at once, especially a place with the dim, fogged lighting and questionable clientele of the Leaky Cauldron.

The tea was particularly good that morning, red-brown and bitter and precisely as she liked it, with only enough milk to cloud it very slightly. She didn't unfold the newspaper right away, merely smoothing it gently with her hand, watching the bright flurry of motion from the various front-page photographs: a short witch vigorously shaking hands with Minister Shacklebolt, her fingers swallowed entirely in his massive brown fist; a ceremonial ribbon-cutting, as St. Mungo's dedicated a new ward for the sole treatment of Second War veterans; enchanted, multicolored confetti falling like snow over the Hogwarts grounds, as the magical reconstruction team declared the castle fully repaired. Life was going on, and that, in and of itself, was good news enough.

“Here you are, Miss Grant.” Tom appeared beside her, steaming breakfast in hand. The sweet little man had even brought her the hot pepper sauce she liked to put on her eggs. He set down the dishes before her, and had begun to walk away when he stopped dead and pivoted back around to face her, plunging his hands deep into his apron pockets.

“Don't want to forget these!” he said, producing a pair of letters from the right side and waggling them slightly. He set them down next to her tea, and gave them an awkward pat. “Glad to see somebody's checking up on you,” he added, an uncomfortably grave look flitting briefly across his face. Hermione nodded, forcing a tepid smile. The old pubkeep was only looking out for her, in his own way. He had no way of knowing how desperately she wanted not to be found at all.

Spiky, familiar handwriting addressed the top letter to _Harmony Grant_ , a name she was now accustomed to seeing in place of her own. It made her feel safer, more in control, to know that she could only be found by those she might actually _want_ to find her. She hadn't fooled herself into thinking the pseudonym was terribly clever - any student of her year would recognize it as the distinctive way in which Professor Binns had often fractured her name - but nevertheless it was another layer in the security blanket she'd drawn up around herself.

In the weeks immediately following Voldemort's death, Hermione had been startled and thoroughly displeased to discover that her hand in it, not to mention her relationship with Harry, had made plenty of strangers aware of her existence. Though Rita Skeeter still steered far clear of Hermione, others of her ilk were soon flooding her with interview requests and surprising her on the streets: women with brittle, insincere smiles and slick-haired men with indecent hunger in their eyes. They'd made wild, wrenchingly accurate speculations about herself and the tragically fallen Ron Weasley, and equally as many winking allusions to romance between her and Harry.

Harry, her beloved brother, the boy with whom she'd grown up, and the man with whom she'd gone to battle. They were two parts of the same story, to be sure, but not in the way that the journalists and opportunists wanted. The articles, the photos, the breathless media obsession, all of it turned her stomach. She'd never wanted even the smallest amount of Harry's fame, and with it thrust upon her she found it was not at all to her taste.

Harry's letter was much the same as his last few. There was the usual cheeriness in the beginning, with lots of meandering commentary on Ginny's schoolwork, goings-on in Hogsmeade - of which there were never very many - and good-natured complaining about the difficulty of his first round of Auror training. He would then move seamlessly into his tireless insistence that she come live in his spare bedroom; her decision to study for her N.E.W.T.s while situated in central London was never one that sat well with him.

But Harry loved Hogwarts so very much; after all, he'd chosen to spend his first year of independent adulthood living in its shadow, taking the Floo to the Ministry every morning. This was mostly so that he could visit with Ginny as much as her academic schedule - and Headmistress McGonagall's somewhat more indulgent rulebook - would allow, but Hermione knew that he was also just not quite ready to say goodbye to the only place he'd ever felt at home. Hermione did not share his sentiment; at least, not anymore.

Hogwarts had been the loveliest place in the world, once: the warm, sand-colored stone and rolling lawns; the tapestry-clad walls and shuffling staircases; even the gnarled borders of the Forbidden Forest, jutting out to swallow the sunlight at the edges of the grounds. She used to adore the castle and all of its mysteries, sitting ancient and proud beside the gleaming mirror of the lake, promising endless knowledge to its pupils.

But that was before. Before she'd seen blood mingling with gemstones on the floor of the Entrance Hall. Before she'd seen Tonks' body crumpled on a makeshift stretcher, not ten feet away from where she'd taken her meals. Before she'd found Ron's remains, his stiffened husk sprawled in the embrace of the forest's muddy floor. In the space of a small number of hours, Hogwarts had ceased to be home to her. When she looked at the castle's soaring arches and turrets, she saw only sharpness and teeth; the classrooms were cramped cells, the air swimming with echoes and stale breath. Even thinking of the Gryffindor common room no longer enveloped her in a feeling of warmth and security. The peace of Hogwarts was forever lost to her, and she would be perfectly content never to set foot within its borders again.

And she wouldn't have had to. After the dust had settled and the deaths had been tallied, the Ministry had fallen all over itself to grant she and Harry their diplomas and a generous handful of N.E.W.T.s each, despite the fact that they were both a full academic year away from commencement. Harry, of course, gladly accepted the reprieve, more than eager to jump headlong into Auror training. He was a young man built for action, wired for perpetual forward motion and the breathless sprint into battle. Poring over leather and parchment in the back corner of a library was never really his area.

But war had not changed Hermione _that_ much; she still needed to do the thing properly. However, as Hogwarts was little more than a throbbing tangle of torch-light and ashes to her now, a crumbling, enormous grave bearing no resemblance to the refuge of her youth, she devised a compromise between her nightmares and her principles: she would sit her N.E.W.T.s in time with the current seventh-years, but she would do so at the Ministry itself, and after having studied on her own, rather than attending classes at the school.

McGonagall was at first utterly horrified by this suggestion, wounding Hermione with her insistence that it was folly to do something halfway, and she should either accept the Ministry's generous certifications or enroll for the full year. Hermione had lashed out, still raw with death and loss, shouting that her teacher did not understand how deeply she now hated this place. McGonagall's famed composure had cracked, and they had dissolved into a blazing row that night, red-faced and bellowing at one another in plain, curious sight of all the past Heads' portraits, the passion fueling both of them clearly coming from deep wells that had nothing to do with academics.

Hermione had, childishly, brandished Ron's name like a whip more than once, and McGonagall had replied in kind by invoking Dumbledore, and they had ended up shouting into the stale air between them until neither could seem to relocate the true thread of the argument. McGonagall had been the first to sink back into her chair, so flushed that for a wild moment Hermione thought she had hollered the older woman to death, and the entire room seemed to exhale and sag with weariness. Some moments later Hermione found herself with a biscuit in one hand and a very small measure of scotch in the other, and though McGonagall agreed to her terms then and there, Hermione had remained in the headmistress' office, talking her throat raw, until the night sky had begun to pale towards dawn.

Hermione put aside Harry's letter, reaching automatically for the next. As soon as she saw the warm curls of black-brown ink, the characters almost swollen in their feminine hand, she dropped it just as quickly as she'd picked it up. _Not again_. She returned her attention to her breakfast, opening the yolk of one of her eggs, and watched with mounting misery as the liquid gold ran out across the plate in bright, lazy lines. In truth, there was no reason why today should be different, she reflected, but that hadn't stopped her from hoping.

Every Tuesday for the past three months, without fail, Hermione had received an owl from Molly Weasley. The correspondence had begun logically enough, though the subject matter made Hermione feel anything but logical: _The burial will be held at two in the afternoon this Sunday. Please stay for dinner._ Two lines of immaculate script, looking shrunken and lonely at the center of the sheet of parchment.

Storms and lack of sun had stolen all of the spring warmth from the air, the day they put Ron in the ground. He was buried beneath a hill half an acre from the barn, and Hermione had only the vaguest memories of the bitterly brief ceremony. She had spent most of it staring at the leftover rain, where it clung stubbornly to leaves and blades of grass and softened the soil beneath her shoes. She did, however, know with certainty that she had not cried; the strangled noises of grief coming from the Weasleys had made her feel oddly like an intruder.

She remembered not being able to quite get a full breath, as though the enormity of her loss was a living thing crowded below her lungs, grown thick and bloated on a diet of unshed tears. Harry was utterly silent, as though he too had died. He held a steadying hand against the small of Ginny's back and stared up at the spaces between the clouds, thin wet lines gleaming on his cheeks.

After too many glasses of redcurrant wine, Mrs. Weasley and her hollowed cheeks had insisted that Hermione spend the night. Bunking on the floor of Ginny's room was a fresh kind of hell, the other girl's sobs puncturing the humid stillness numerous times throughout the night. When Ginny finally dropped off into sleep, three or four or one hundred hours after they'd first retired, Hermione finally allowed her grief to suck her under like an iron wave. Sunrise found her wide awake, face streaked, with stiff, numb fingers clenched around handfuls of her quilt.

It was the only night since the end of the war that she had escaped her nightmares, but that was cold comfort. She felt like someone had twisted and wrung her out, and she might never spring back to her original shape.

Since that day, Mrs. Weasley had tried to communicate with her on a near-constant basis, and Harry confirmed that she owled him frequently as well. Every time she spied that familiar hand, Hermione's insides would shrink and contract like vine cuttings left in the sun. Though she couldn't imagine what Molly's day-to-day life was like now, having lost a child, she could objectively understand why it would lead her to cling tightly to her late son's closest friends. But objective understanding aside, Hermione had her own grief to shoulder, and there were days when its weight threatened to completely immobilize her.

In the very beginning, it had. She no longer spent her days staring hollow-eyed into the fire, voice rusting with lack of use, but she certainly wasn't yet strong enough to help stem the endless tide of a mother's loss. Every letter she received renewed in her the desperate, fervent wish that she find the words to make Mrs. Weasley understand how she felt.

But none of them understood one another all that well, not anymore. Tragedy had stranded them all on separate islands, broken spits of land cutting up through black water that never ended, and each of them had forgotten how to swim.

Bill and Fleur had moved back to the Burrow, on a temporary basis. As the eldest of the Weasley offspring, Bill had felt it fell to him to look after his parents; they had been losing weight and spending much of their time in ponderous silence, though they were doing rather well, all things considered. Bill was as kind and lighthearted as he had ever been, trademark long hair and jewelry still intact. His presence provided a welcome surge of warmth to the Burrow, which had started to fill with a damp gloom at the corners.

Strangely, of the two of them, it was Fleur who seemed outwardly to have been most stricken by Ron's death. If someone forgot themselves and uttered his name, which was so often danced around and avoided that it may as well have had its own Taboo, she would gasp sharply and duck her head, letting her silvery hair close about her face like a curtain of light. Sometimes her hand would disappear behind the platinum sheet with a handkerchief, and it would return smudged black and blue with eye makeup. Hermione found the reaction oddly touching, unable to even be jealous when she thought of the fierce blush that would streak Ron's face if he could see it.

Fred and George were still living and working in Diagon Alley, bringing in as obscenely much money as ever, but Hermione knew, from her frequent visits and their own reluctant admissions, that they hadn't invented anything new since the war. George told her once, over an after-work drink that had somehow turned into six, that it wasn't for lack of imagination; it was that every time an idea came to him, he would hear Ron reacting to it in his head, and the excitement would turn to ice in his veins.

“It's usually something indignant about never getting a family discount,” George had said, with a sardonic smile that didn't reach his eyes. “But sometimes he comes right out and calls it rubbish.” He had dropped his gaze to the thin golden layer of butterbeer pooled at the bottom of his mug. “If he ever says it's bloody brilliant, then I'll know I'm onto something.” Hermione had nodded and found herself quite unable to speak for a few moments, the thought of Ron's voice knifing through her and leaving her breathless.

Ginny was, if it were possible, even more ferociously independent than before. Though she indulged Harry's attempts to play house on the weekends, outside of their relationship she was a volatile being, a roving spark that caught on anything that stood still long enough. She refused to talk about Ron, but she talked about everything else, loudly, hexing Slytherins and drinking her weight in firewhiskey and generally seeming as though she were trying to live out her last year at Hogwarts for the both of them. Hermione sent her letters reminding her gently about due dates for projects, and occasionally Flooed the common room fire in the middle of the night to ensure she made it up to her dormitory before falling asleep.

Harry, meanwhile, had pitched himself headlong into the work he'd always dreamed of doing, and found, to the surprise of absolutely no one, that Auror training suited him perfectly. Not only did it keep him busy, but it provided a conduit for all of the talent that he hadn't fully nurtured at Hogwarts. Without the constant threat of his own death shadowing his everyday activities, he was able to funnel all of his attentions into his schoolwork. He even managed to hover at the middle of the pack in his Poisons and Antidotes class, with neither Snape's needling nor the unfair advantage of Snape's textbook.

There were days when Hermione woke with guilt heavy in her gut, feeling as though there were more that she could do. That there _must_ be. Ron would certainly have thought she could be the sturdy twine that stitched them all back together again, but then, Ron always thought she had a bit more of the superhero in her than she actually did.

Hermione took a bite of her rapidly cooling breakfast, a way of fortifying herself for the inevitable. With lightly trembling hands, she took up Mrs. Weasley’s letter.

_Arthur and I would like to visit next time we’re up at the shop. Could you send us a few dates when you’ll be available next month?_

As always, unadorned and blunt, yet painfully polite. But the content of the two brief lines was unusual, and Hermione found herself staring at the script without comprehension. _They want to visit?_ This was an entirely unprecedented request.

Hermione put aside the letter, vowing to approach the issue later when she’d had her tea. _Or never_. She _was_ rather lonely, if she were honest, but if they’d dropped more weight, if their eyes were still bleak and flat, it would take her weeks to claw her way back up out of her despair. She’d never quite got past thinking of them as her would-be in-laws, unhealthy as it was.

The pub was lightening up as the morning sun strengthened, and Hermione lost herself a bit in watching dust float through a nearby shaft of light, until the door-bell chimed someone’s arrival.

The figure stood in the shadows, and so Hermione’s eyes registered only a whitish blur at first. But the fuzzy image soon resolved itself into a fine-featured, platinum blonde boy, and suddenly she was on her feet, her wand clenched in her sweating palm.

The boy somehow managed to make his chuckle thick with loathing.

“ _Granger_?”

 

 


End file.
